Labor

Jonathan Tasini, a longtime labor activist and contributor to The Huffington Post, recently wrote about a report from the National Labor Committee which detailed labor abuses at a factory in Jordan which manufactures Victoria's Secret bikinis and lingerie. The factory employs 150 guest workers, most of whom originate from Bangladesh and lack the necessary residency permits to leave the industrial park where the factory is located.

In the past two decades, spa treatments have gone from being a luxury for the rich to a regular ritual in the lives of many women. A recent article in New York Magazine examines this phenomenon, as well as the varied working conditions for the waxers, manicurists and aestheticians whose job it is to make you feel beautiful. If you plan on visiting one sometime soon, find a place that treats its workers right and be sure to tip well.

When the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' four-year boycott of Yum! Brands Inc. finally came to an end in 2005 with the company agreeing to pay tomato pickers a penny more per pound, it represented one of the largest victories that labor organizers have seen in American agriculture in many years. The CIW has since turned its efforts to convincing the nation's second largest fast food chain, Burger King, to join its competitors and institute a one penny per pound price increase. Burger King has thus far resisted.

How much are you willing to do to pay as little as $10 for a flight? That is the question that Skybus Airlines has started to ask consumers. The airline has no phone number, passengers are encouraged to check themselves in, and may even deposit and pick up their own luggage. Yet, for $10, what do you expect?

Part of our society’s growing green practices as ethical and socially conscious consumers is to recycle old computers, monitors, drives, televisions, cell phones and other electronic gadget waste. But our e-waste in many cases is not being recycled here, but is being shipped out of America as a global jet stream of electronic waste to countries with low-wage workers.